A Tyranny of Queens

A Tyranny of Queens was more of an impulse buy for me, based on my desire to support the author after she became the focus point of some nasty internet attacks from right-wing morons. This is the sequel to an Accident of Stars, which I honestly didn't love - I found the main character, a white Australian teenage girl called Saffron who falls through a portal to a country called Kena, too unrealistically "woke", and some of the things that happened to her felt rather laboured. I'm happy to report, however, that I didn't have the same problems with this sequel at all. I particularly enjoyed the scenes where Saffron, who was sent back to our world at the end of the first book with some literally inexplicable scars and injuries, is forced to return to a school where her value as a young woman is being constantly dismissed or used to benefit other students above herself, and finds herself much less able to simply swallow the tiny injustices being perpetrated against her. I don't know if I liked this more than its predecessor because the narrative is different, or because I look for different things in books now, but either way I liked all of the characters and their journeys here, and I appreciate why Meadows chose to have an open minded protagonist whose learning journey isn't foregrounded relative to the struggles of the other characters around her. An enthusiastic 8 out of 10.